When the NCAA canceled March Madness it was only a matter of time until one group or another decided to come up with a substitute tournament - brackets and all. But we never could have guessed it would be in the form of the Ultimate Stand-Up Comic Bracket. Their final round put Norm Macdonald up against Dave Chappelle, and Macdonald came out the winner, garnering 53.49% of the 18,020 votes cast. We owe a lot to the stand-ups. They deliver laughter that raises our spirits and dispels our stress.
It seems standing up and moving around starting first thing in the morning can do that for you too. A new study in the journal Hypertension reveals that adding a 30 minute morning walk to an otherwise sedentary day helps obese folks age 55 to 80 lower their blood pressure. Over three weeks, the sedentary folks who did the rise-and-shine walk saw their systolic (top) number fall by an average of 3.4 points and their diastolic number by up to 1.6.
Those who added a pattern of standing up every 30 minutes and doing three minutes of light-intensity walking to the morning 30 minute meander saw their top number go down an average of 5.1 points and the lower number decline by up to 1.8. In addition, women saw their levels of the stress hormone epinephrine decline by 12% to 13%.
Making these small changes to the daily pattern of inactivity can help protect against high blood pressure-related heart attack and stroke. And that's no laughing matter.
Distributed by King Features Syndicate, Inc.
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